Deep Focus 

Compelling new techniques in the arts are often picked up and imitated until they seem to have always been used. Discoveries of Florentine painters in the early Renaissance include a naturalistic style using tools like sfumato, chiaroscuro, and proportion. Some of these methods are so obvious as to seem inevitable—proportion, for example—despite the fact that over many centuries, even millennia, of art, they weren’t used. Similarly, the film technique of deep focus was partly or slightly used in some early films, such as the 1922 Weimar production of Nosferatu, a vampire tale directed by F. W. Murnau. The technique was pointedly used in Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane, with every stage of the mythic American plutocrat’s life (based on William Randolph Hearst) illustrated by memorable scenes using deep focus. In an early scene, for example, Kane’s mother, played by a grim Agnes Moorehead, signs away her son’s life, while in the near background, her husband disagrees with giving him up, and through the window in the far background, the childhood Kane—perfectly framed and just as clearly in focus—plays happily in the snow, oblivious of what is to come. Cinematographer Gregg Toland used the method and later wrote about it in a 1932 article in Theatre Arts magazine, calling it “Pan-focus,” in which everything from two to two hundred feet of depth is sharply seen. 

Late Victorian and modern fiction writers used a texturing of reality and point of view reminiscent of deep focus in film. Limited third-person point of view allows the protagonists of stories to be not fully aware of what they are causing or participating in. They transmit their milieu or mindset even to the point of being lost in it, making their own discoveries of the truth more powerful, if discovery happens, as it does to Citizen Kane’s viewers, though not to its protagonist.